The average college student spends $900 per year. Because textbooks are frequently updated and new volumes are printed every few years, used textbooks are often unavailable for students. Professional texts and journals with limited readership may cost several hundred dollars. In addition, students are often unable to sell their used textbooks once new editions have been released.
Many professions and academic disciplines are based on cumulative research and hence the use of reference materials. For example, doctors and lawyers are required to access a large body of prior knowledge in making diagnoses, staying current and in rendering various types of opinions. Hence, professionals are often required to purchase each new edition even if the new edition contains only an insubstantial volume of new information.
If textbooks were published in a digital format, textbook production costs could be lessened by as much as 55.6%, reducing the average cost of a textbook to $23.54. In addition, publishing textbooks in a digital format would eliminate 100% of the physical resources of a traditional print version.
E-book devices allow readers to purchase books which have been formatted using one of the many different types of e-book formats for reading using an e-book device.
There are numerous e-books currently available; the most popular is Amazon's Kindle. Amazon released its first generation Kindle in November 2007. The Kindle sold out in five and a half hours and remained out of stock until late April 2008.
Amazon released its second generation Kindle, Kindle 2 in February 2009. Kindle 2 has a 6 inch display, 2 GB of internal memory (1.4 GB is user accessible) and a USB port. Kindle DX was released in May 2009. Kindle DX has a 9.7 inch display and is the first Kindle model which allows the reader to switch between portrait and landscape orientations. Kindle DX can also support PDF files and has built-in stereo speakers. Both Kindle 2 and Kindle DX allow the reader to search the text although the devices' searching capabilities are limited (e.g., can only search for the root of the word, but not an ending). It is estimated that Amazon will sell $750 million in Kindles by 2010, an estimated 3% of Amazon's total revenue.
There are currently a number of e-book formats for viewing electronic books, each having various capabilities and features. One of the most popular e-book formats is HTML which is the markup language used for most web pages. HTML adds especially marked meta elements to otherwise plain text encoded using characters sets such as ASCII or UTF-8. HTML generator applications are usually easy to use and often require less intricate knowledge of the format details involved. On the other hand, HTML is not particularly efficient for storing information and requires more storage space than many other formats. In addition, HTML does not describe pages and has no facility to store multiple images in a single file. When e-books are HTML format, each file usually contains only one chapter.
Another popular e-book format is the AZW format, Amazon's proprietary format. The AZW format is based on the Mobipocket standard, but uses a slightly different serial number scheme (e.g., it uses an asterisk instead of a dollar sign) and its own DRM formatting. The AZW format does not fully support PDFs.
Mobipocket is an e-book format based on the Open eBook standard using XHTML. The Mobipocket Reader allows readers to add blank pages in any part of the book and add free-hand drawings. The reader can also include annotations, such as highlights, bookmarks, corrections, notes and drawings, which can then be applied, organized, and recalled from a single location. The Mobipocket Reader also has electronic bookmarks and a built-in dictionary.
Another e-book format is the eReader format, a program for viewing Palm Digital Media electronic books. The eReader shows text one page at a time, supports embedded hyperlinks, images and features such as bookmarks and footnotes enabling the user to mark any page with a bookmark and any part of the text with a footnote-like commentary. Footnotes can later be exported as a Memo document. In addition, eReader also supports an integrated reference dictionary allowing any word in the text to be highlighted and looked up in the dictionary instantly.
Currently none of these e-book formats has a range of capabilities for academic use. Moreover, electronic reader devices are not designed to facilitate academic learning and professional development.
In addition, electronic reader devices are not designed to facilitate visual learning, which is an important component of academic learning. Visual learning is a teaching method and learning component in which ideas, concepts, data and other information are associated with images and techniques and formats. Visual learning is one of the three basic types of learning styles, in addition to kinesthetic learning and auditory learning. Reinforcing text materials through interactive tools and allowing a reader to both actively manipulate text information and visually organize it can greatly increase learning and comprehension for all age groups, academic levels and professional users.
In addition to the foregoing languages specifically for e-books, extensible markup language (“XML”) provides a mature and standardized interface for electronic publishing. XML has become a widely utilized medium for the exchange of data on the WWW. XML is an example of a heterogeneous database language. Vendors (such as Oracle®, IBM®, and Microsoft®) have fast-tracked XML implementation modules for their traditional databases and have (or are) designing XML native databases.
A heterogeneous database language such as XML theoretically allows publishers and designers to create their own customized tag elements, enabling the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications.
In relation to the publishing of reference materials, such as medical texts or treatises, XML has been utilized as the supporting heterogeneous database language to a variety of sources, including: UMLS® Metathesaurus® (the “Metathesaurus®”), SPECIALIST Lexicon, and UMLS® Semantic Network. The Metathesaurus® currently contains content from over 60 biomedical vocabularies and classifications. It preserves the names, meanings, hierarchical contexts, attributes, and an inter-term relationships present in its source vocabularies, adds certain basic information to each concept, and establishes new relationships between terms from different source vocabularies. The Metathesaurus® supplies information that computer programs can use to interpret user inquiries, interact with users to refine their questions, identify which databases contain information relevant to particular inquiries, and convert the users' terms into the vocabulary used by relevant information sources. The Metathesaurus® is intended primarily for use by system developers, but can also be a useful reference tool for database builders, librarians, and other information professionals.
UMLS® SPECIALIST Lexicon (the “SPECIALIST”) for recognizing language provides a further example of a heterogeneous database language used to assist researcher users in the biomedical field. SPECIALIST extracts syntactic, morphological, and orthographic information. It includes a file of known derivational variants, a file of closely related terms that mean the same thing but may have a different syntactic category, a file of spelling alternations, and a file of neoclassical combining forms with their meanings.
Similarly UMLS® Semantic Network (the “Semantic Network”) provides 134 semantic subtypes to provide consistent categorization of all concepts within the Metathesaurus® with 54 links between semantic subtypes. While all information about specific concepts is found in the Metathesaurus®, the Semantic Network provides information about the basic semantic types that are assigned to these concepts, and it defines the relationships that hold between the semantic types. Thus, the Semantic Network serves as an authority for the semantic types that are assigned to concepts in the Metathesaurus®. It defines these types, both with textual descriptions and by means of the information inherent in its hierarchies.
System developers can use these UMLS® products free of charge after applying for a UMLS® license. Applications of UMLS® can be found in systems focused on patient data, digital libraries, Web and bibliographic retrieval, natural language processing, and decision support.
Another product which is free of charge is MeSH, yet another known lexical product, provides a simple layer in that it consists of a thesaurus with a set of terms or subject headings that are arranged in both an alphabetic and a hierarchical structure. It contains more than 19,000 main headings as well as 103,500 headings called Supplementary Concept Records within a separate chemical thesaurus. There are also thousands of cross-references that assist in finding the most appropriate MeSH heading (e.g., Vitamin C see Ascorbic Acid). MeSH is free to users and an electronic form can easily be downloaded.
The prior art also includes software enabling research users to express relationships between existing resources (i.e., content) such as the Resource Description Framework (“RDF”) and the RDF Schema (“RDFS”) as forms for expressing relationships and semantic metadata. RDF is a general framework used for describing metadata and provides interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information. RDFS is a specification that describes how to use RDF to describe RDF vocabularies and defines a basic vocabulary for this purpose, as well as conventions that can be used by semantic applications to support a more sophisticated RDF vocabulary description. A further development has been the DARPA Agent Markup Language (“DAML”) and the Ontology Inference Layer (“OIL”) specifications, which are currently being combined to produce DAML+OIL. DAML+OIL is a semantic markup language for Web resources that builds upon the earlier W3C® standards of RDF and RDFS, extending these languages with richer modeling primitives allowing more complex objects and operations to be constructed.
It is desirable to have an electronic reader adapted for the specialized needs of the research users, having a hardware design and software functionality to facilitate such use which uses a form of heterogeneous database language and open source or freely available prior art software (such as .html, Metathesaurus®, SPECIALIST Lexicon, UMLS® Semantic Network, MeSH, RDF, and RDFS) to standardize the interface necessary for implementing such features.
It is desirable to have an academic study tool utilizing e-book technology which can be used as a learning tool for children by providing tools to teach them to abstract information, and which provides visual reinforcement of concepts as well as an interactive experience when reading tex.
It is further desirable to have an academic study tool utilizing e-book technology which assists professionals in organizing and abstracting information; creating outlines, notes and study materials; and in visualizing the interaction between key concepts.
It is further desirable to have an academic study tool utilizing e-book technology which reduces the costs of books and updating them.
It is further desirable to have an academic study tool utilizing e-book technology which conserves the physical resources consumed for printed books.